Jeremy Rifkin writes in The Guardian today about frightening developments in the development of lab animals: mice with human brains, pigs with human blood, sheep with human livers and hearts. He describes speculation about creating a human-chimpanzee chimera. Chimpanzees and humans already have in common 98% of their genetic code, and, Rifkin says, and adult chimpanzees has the mental abilities and consciousness of a 4-year-old human.
Of course, a 4-year-old human does not in return have the mental abilities and consciousness of an adult chimpanzee. Which is to say, the chimpanzee has its own consciousness. Rifkin worries about the ethical challenges these chimeras will raise. But if researchers can rationalize their abuse of "98% human" chimpanzees, they will have no problem continuing with "99% human" models, especially if they are the ones that create such an animal.
Rifkin says this can not go farther. But it has already gone too far. He implies that research with "normal" animals is ethically sound. It is not.
Animal research is justified in that it provides "models" for human physiology and even psychology where it would be unethical to experiment on people. Ethics should tell us that such similarity, not to mention the integrity of each animal's own individual and social life, means that using them so is as wrong as using people. Well, the researchers say, they are not in fact so very like us, because human tests are ultimately necessary to prove what was found in the animals. Then the animal tests are not only unethical but ultimately unjustifiable! What does it mean to be human? For many, it seems, it means to be different from the other animals, which we can easily prove by using them for tawdry entertainment, useless research, wasteful food, and decadent clothing -- just as racists and sexists cling to their historical or imagined privileges, to their sense, however deluded, of being above their victims.
Are you a man or a mouse? Yes.
categories: animal rights, ethics
March 15, 2005
March 14, 2005
parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
a fable . . .
The environmental groups were very worried about the ill effects of fossil and nuclear fuels. They quaked and roared that people must cut back their lavish wasteful lifestyles. The deregulated energy industry did not fear. They showed the environmental groups how they don't have to tell people to give anything up. The industrialists told them that energy from the wind could replace most of the energy from fossil and nuclear fuels.
The environmental groups swelled with pride and joined with industry to build the fabulous turbines. They built them bigger and bigger, more and more of them. The ground shook, trees fell, wild animals fled as the giant wings began to roar with the wind. People were full of awe. They fell to their knees with wonder.
And like the mountain that labored to produce but a little mouse, the thousands of wind turbines -- hundreds of feet high, covering landscapes in every direction, swallowing billions of dollars of resources -- produced but a ridiculous trickle of electricity.
Aesop's crowd laughed at their credulity and returned to their homes. Horace warned poets about promising a mountain lest only a mouse emerges from their pen. The energy industry, however, promises even bigger mountains, and the environmental groups won't admit their folly as long as more people join them. The people are still on their knees, denying the mouse has already run past.
categories: wind power, wind energy, wind farms
The environmental groups were very worried about the ill effects of fossil and nuclear fuels. They quaked and roared that people must cut back their lavish wasteful lifestyles. The deregulated energy industry did not fear. They showed the environmental groups how they don't have to tell people to give anything up. The industrialists told them that energy from the wind could replace most of the energy from fossil and nuclear fuels.
The environmental groups swelled with pride and joined with industry to build the fabulous turbines. They built them bigger and bigger, more and more of them. The ground shook, trees fell, wild animals fled as the giant wings began to roar with the wind. People were full of awe. They fell to their knees with wonder.
And like the mountain that labored to produce but a little mouse, the thousands of wind turbines -- hundreds of feet high, covering landscapes in every direction, swallowing billions of dollars of resources -- produced but a ridiculous trickle of electricity.
Aesop's crowd laughed at their credulity and returned to their homes. Horace warned poets about promising a mountain lest only a mouse emerges from their pen. The energy industry, however, promises even bigger mountains, and the environmental groups won't admit their folly as long as more people join them. The people are still on their knees, denying the mouse has already run past.
categories: wind power, wind energy, wind farms
"It Ain't Easy Being White"
'Hang around the working class places very long and you'll see that they almost never talk about current events. They never mention politics except in an election year. They never mention any larger issues than sports, movies, and where to get good ribs and seafood and why GM just can't seem to build a decent engine. They put up flags and patriotic symbols because it seems like the right thing to do because everybody else does. But no conscious analysis takes place. Most working whites, blue collar, technical, service or whatever, are nonpolitical. And to the extent that they hold beliefs, they hold the beliefs they think they are expected to hold. Just like they hold little flags, and ribbons for the troops. That's to tell you who they believe they are, Americans and Americans only. Plain Americans, cut from the rest of the world by a self isolating belief that it's better to be American than anything else, even if they really can't prove why. Ignorance is bliss and, somehow, America is where everyone supposedly dreams to be. No depth of thought and consciousness involved or required. There is the American on top and the rest of the world who is envious and plotting to steal their freedom.
'In the end maybe we cannot count on white Americans to change. An African American friend writes me that, "As long as Americans have that belief, Bush is safe and the world is in trouble. For all I know, the liberals and the suburbanites, even the progressives and leftists are a bunch of know it alls with the same supremacist tendencies in sheep clothing. They just can't shed this hubris of the curse of being better than the rest of the world for no good reason. There is something pathetic about this world view. So I'll just work with people of color because they don't seem to have this illusion and actually like other cultures and the world. They are the future and they need to be in power because they will change the status quo. I don't believe that white people in general want to change anything at all."
'... Let's be honest. The liberal elite is not entirely a Republican myth. This generation of white liberals is not involved in class issues, and have become more about trendiness. To the average working American Friends and Sex and the City is the face of modern liberal culture. They are not wrong. The very fact that most elite celebrities call themselves "liberal" and don't receive any heat tells you something is very wrong. A real class warrior would spit on the celebrities and materialistic, narcissistic celebrity itself.
'... The United States no longer has citizens. It has consumers. So middle class liberals delude themselves into thinking they are so different from people like Pooty, Dink and the others who break wind and pool sticks down here at Burt's Tavern based upon their consumer choices. Most liberals are not in a much higher income bracket, but their consumer choices -- paid for on credit -- allow them to mimic the ruling class. Starbucks vs Sanka, Mother Jones vs George Jones. Mark Twain vs Shania Twain. . . . There is little hope for us until we realize these ultimately meaningless consumer choices are not representative of any competing or compelling values, but merely distractions that stimulate and keep alive class divisions and hatreds.
'... Liberals hate Bush because he is a traitor to the white classes. Bush revealed the true face of American power and exposed it as the corrupt hoax it really is. He is a "cowboy" imperialist as opposed to the more acceptable kind -- the Kennedy, Carter, Clinton type who conducted their dark little murders at the edge of the empire in secrecy while Americans wasted most of the worlds resources. The Anybody But Bush crowd would have approved the use of force against Iraq if it had been presented by a senator from a Blue State with a bullshit UN resolution, as opposed to a simple 'Yeeee-ha' from a retard frat-boy from Texas and overwhelming international revulsion. Either way, the ruling political and corporate elites still maintain their privileges and status. The ABB movement was not about stripping anyone of those; it was simply about keeping self-serving appearances to preserve our Jabba the Hutt worldview and lifestyle.'
'In the end maybe we cannot count on white Americans to change. An African American friend writes me that, "As long as Americans have that belief, Bush is safe and the world is in trouble. For all I know, the liberals and the suburbanites, even the progressives and leftists are a bunch of know it alls with the same supremacist tendencies in sheep clothing. They just can't shed this hubris of the curse of being better than the rest of the world for no good reason. There is something pathetic about this world view. So I'll just work with people of color because they don't seem to have this illusion and actually like other cultures and the world. They are the future and they need to be in power because they will change the status quo. I don't believe that white people in general want to change anything at all."
'... Let's be honest. The liberal elite is not entirely a Republican myth. This generation of white liberals is not involved in class issues, and have become more about trendiness. To the average working American Friends and Sex and the City is the face of modern liberal culture. They are not wrong. The very fact that most elite celebrities call themselves "liberal" and don't receive any heat tells you something is very wrong. A real class warrior would spit on the celebrities and materialistic, narcissistic celebrity itself.
'... The United States no longer has citizens. It has consumers. So middle class liberals delude themselves into thinking they are so different from people like Pooty, Dink and the others who break wind and pool sticks down here at Burt's Tavern based upon their consumer choices. Most liberals are not in a much higher income bracket, but their consumer choices -- paid for on credit -- allow them to mimic the ruling class. Starbucks vs Sanka, Mother Jones vs George Jones. Mark Twain vs Shania Twain. . . . There is little hope for us until we realize these ultimately meaningless consumer choices are not representative of any competing or compelling values, but merely distractions that stimulate and keep alive class divisions and hatreds.
'... Liberals hate Bush because he is a traitor to the white classes. Bush revealed the true face of American power and exposed it as the corrupt hoax it really is. He is a "cowboy" imperialist as opposed to the more acceptable kind -- the Kennedy, Carter, Clinton type who conducted their dark little murders at the edge of the empire in secrecy while Americans wasted most of the worlds resources. The Anybody But Bush crowd would have approved the use of force against Iraq if it had been presented by a senator from a Blue State with a bullshit UN resolution, as opposed to a simple 'Yeeee-ha' from a retard frat-boy from Texas and overwhelming international revulsion. Either way, the ruling political and corporate elites still maintain their privileges and status. The ABB movement was not about stripping anyone of those; it was simply about keeping self-serving appearances to preserve our Jabba the Hutt worldview and lifestyle.'
-- Joe Bageant
category: politics
March 12, 2005
"Bush's Horse Killers"
'Once protected by federal law, the nation's 3,000 wild burros and 33,000 wild horses, as well as 24,000 horses in short- and long-term sanctuaries, now face Congressionally approved slaughter.
'Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) inserted a rider into the 3,000-page omnibus spending bill of 2005, approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, that requires the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to sell all wild horses and burros which have not been adopted in three attempts or which are 10 years or older. Wild burros have life spans of 25-30 years; domesticated burros can live 45 years; wild horses have life spans of 20-25 years. The animals, according to the legislation, "shall" be sold, and can be butchered. There were no hearings or debate.
'The public may not know what forces helped convince Burns to silently insert the rider into the Appropriations Act, but one thing is certain -- the beef industry has its brand all over it.
'During the mid-1800s, more than 2.3 million wild horses and 60 million bison freely roamed America's west. But, ranchers, who had already seized land from the Indians and were deep into a land war with farmers, saw horses as competition for unfenced grazing land. They poisoned the horses' watering holes, blinded the lead stallions by shooting their eyes out, or simply ran them to death, up and over cliffs, according to Mike Markarian, executive vice-president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Ranchers "even captured wild mustangs, sewed their nostrils shut with rawhide so they could barely breathe, and returned them to their herds so they would slow down the other horses and make them much easier to capture," says Markarian. In 1897, Nevada allowed unlimited killing of mustangs.
'By 1900, the bison were almost extinct, the result of indiscriminate killing during the nation's "Manifest Destiny." A half-century later, mustangs were close to meeting the same fate as the bison. That's when Velma Johnston, to become known as "Wild Horse Annie," began a national campaign to save wild horses and burros. It took two decades until Congress unanimously passed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 that gave federal protection to the animals and made it a felony for anyone to capture or harm them.
'In 1974, the first federal census of wild horses and burros revealed that only 60,000 remained in Arizona, California, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The BLM plans to reduce the population on public lands to about 20,000, removing at least 11,500 wild horses and burros in 2005. This number is below the minimum necessary to sustain healthy populations, according Dr. Gus Cothran, equine geneticist at the University of Kentucky. The minimum number of horses and burros in each herd management area (HMA) needs to be at least 150, says Cothran; under BLM plans, about 70 percent of the HMAs will have fewer than 100 animals. Estimates by animal rights groups place the number that will probably be slaughtered by the end of the year at 6,000-14,000.'
'Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) inserted a rider into the 3,000-page omnibus spending bill of 2005, approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, that requires the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to sell all wild horses and burros which have not been adopted in three attempts or which are 10 years or older. Wild burros have life spans of 25-30 years; domesticated burros can live 45 years; wild horses have life spans of 20-25 years. The animals, according to the legislation, "shall" be sold, and can be butchered. There were no hearings or debate.
'The public may not know what forces helped convince Burns to silently insert the rider into the Appropriations Act, but one thing is certain -- the beef industry has its brand all over it.
'During the mid-1800s, more than 2.3 million wild horses and 60 million bison freely roamed America's west. But, ranchers, who had already seized land from the Indians and were deep into a land war with farmers, saw horses as competition for unfenced grazing land. They poisoned the horses' watering holes, blinded the lead stallions by shooting their eyes out, or simply ran them to death, up and over cliffs, according to Mike Markarian, executive vice-president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Ranchers "even captured wild mustangs, sewed their nostrils shut with rawhide so they could barely breathe, and returned them to their herds so they would slow down the other horses and make them much easier to capture," says Markarian. In 1897, Nevada allowed unlimited killing of mustangs.
'By 1900, the bison were almost extinct, the result of indiscriminate killing during the nation's "Manifest Destiny." A half-century later, mustangs were close to meeting the same fate as the bison. That's when Velma Johnston, to become known as "Wild Horse Annie," began a national campaign to save wild horses and burros. It took two decades until Congress unanimously passed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 that gave federal protection to the animals and made it a felony for anyone to capture or harm them.
'In 1974, the first federal census of wild horses and burros revealed that only 60,000 remained in Arizona, California, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The BLM plans to reduce the population on public lands to about 20,000, removing at least 11,500 wild horses and burros in 2005. This number is below the minimum necessary to sustain healthy populations, according Dr. Gus Cothran, equine geneticist at the University of Kentucky. The minimum number of horses and burros in each herd management area (HMA) needs to be at least 150, says Cothran; under BLM plans, about 70 percent of the HMAs will have fewer than 100 animals. Estimates by animal rights groups place the number that will probably be slaughtered by the end of the year at 6,000-14,000.'
-- Walter Brasch
categories: politics, animal rights
"Prototype blades blown away"
The Manawatu (New Zealand) Standard reported that the blades of the prototype Windflow turbine on the Tararua Range were blown off by strong winds Thursday night.
It was estimated that the wind had gusted to 90 km/h (56 mph). The turbine is rated to operate in winds up to 108 km/h (67 mph) and then lock down. The New Zealand Herald reported that the whole blade assembly and the gearbox inside the turbine housing was torn off. Windflow's stock price also fell.
categories: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines
It was estimated that the wind had gusted to 90 km/h (56 mph). The turbine is rated to operate in winds up to 108 km/h (67 mph) and then lock down. The New Zealand Herald reported that the whole blade assembly and the gearbox inside the turbine housing was torn off. Windflow's stock price also fell.
categories: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines
March 11, 2005
"Targeting Giuliana"
"I also believe that a clear motivation for preventing Sgrena from telling her story is quite evident. Let us recall that the first target in the second attack upon the city of Fallujah was al-Fallujah General Hospital. Why? It was the reporting of enormous civilian casualties from this hospital that compelled the US to halt its attack. In other words, the control of information from Fallujah as to consequences of the US assault, particularly with regard to civilians, became a critical element in the military operation.
"Now, in a report by Iraq's health ministry we are learning that the US used mustard, nerve gas and napalm in the manner of Saddam against the civilian population of Fallujah. Sgrena, herself, has provided photographic evidence of the use of cluster bombs and the wounding of children there. I have searched in vain to find these reports in any major corporate media. The American population, for the most part, is ignorant of what its military is doing in their name and must remain so in order for the US to wage its war against the Iraqi people.
"Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn't simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target."
category: politics
"Now, in a report by Iraq's health ministry we are learning that the US used mustard, nerve gas and napalm in the manner of Saddam against the civilian population of Fallujah. Sgrena, herself, has provided photographic evidence of the use of cluster bombs and the wounding of children there. I have searched in vain to find these reports in any major corporate media. The American population, for the most part, is ignorant of what its military is doing in their name and must remain so in order for the US to wage its war against the Iraqi people.
"Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn't simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target."
-- Jerry Fresia
It has been reported in the Italian press, and confirmed by the U.S. ambassador, that the soldiers who targeted Giuliana Sgrena (the Italian journalist who had just been freed after a month with kidnappers) were a special guard patrol for U.S. ambassador to Iraq John "Death Squad" Negroponte.category: politics
Green energy?
Ron (at Flickr)
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